Background

Dr. Pauling, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

I wonder if you might recall for us the early days of the peace movement
right after the Second World War. You were a member of Einstein's Emergency
Committee of Atomic Scientists, one of the first efforts.

That's right. I got interested in world peace in 1945. I had been
working during the Second World War, and for a little while earlier than that,
a year or two earlier, on war projects. I still was Professor/Chairman of the
Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of
Technology, but I had about 20 contracts with the Office of Scientific Research
and Development. Oppenheimer asked me to come to Los Alamos as head of the
chemistry section of the atomic bomb project, and I decided not to do it. I had
so much going on in Pasadena, including continuing teaching chemistry and this
large amount of war work. When the atomic bombs were dropped, exploded, over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, I was very soon asked by the Rotary Club in
Hollywood to talk about nuclear fission, about the nature of these weapons. I
was able to do so because I had not been connected with the atomic energy
project and had no classified information about these weapons. So I began
giving talks, popular talks, to groups of that sort which were purely
education, descriptive in nature, with little political content. Rather soon,
they began to involve the expression of my own ideas -- I don't remember just
how early it was that I was able to quote Albert Einstein as saying that now
that a single bomb can destroy a whole city and a single rocket can lob it
over, the time has come when we must give up war. But then I was asked to join
the Board of Trustees of the Einstein Committee, the Emergency Committee of
Atomic Scientists, which consisted only of the Board of Trustees, half a dozen
scientists, Albert Einstein as chairman and Harold Urey as vice chairman. So
every few months I went with my wife to Princeton to a meeting of this board,
and later I began making lecture tours, partially along with Leo Szilard. We
would show a film which the committee had made, the first film about atomic
bombs explaining what nuclear war would be. Just a little atomic bomb of the
Hiroshima - Nagasaki type then. And Leo Szilard would give a talk and I would
speak, too, about the necessity to understand what had happened in the world
now that the means of waging war had changed in such an astounding way.

And very early on, you were advocating against the production of the
hydrogen bomb, even in the late 40s.

I opposed the construction of the hydrogen bomb on the,
I think, rather reasonable grounds that an ordinary atomic bomb could destroy a
whole city, even the biggest cities. It could do much damage, perhaps kill a
million people out of the 10 million in a large city, and that there was no
need to accelerate the arms race by developing weapons a thousand times more
powerful.